Making the Invisible Visible: Disability Inclusive Development in Solomon Islands

International and national level disability inclusive discourse, policy and strategy typically render invisible the institutional structures, political economies and socio-cultural power relations that constitute the lived experience of disability. The lack of robust information on disability extends these theoretical blind spots to the absence of disability in official statistics, political dialogue and social policy. Empirically grounded, inclusive research that recognises disability as embedded in globalised political economies and culturally specific power relations is required to address the theoretical, statistical and programmatic invisibility of disability. Such research will provide a solid knowledge base on which to build effective inclusive interventions.     

Towards Law and Music

Through a review of Sara Ramshaw’s, Justice as Improvisation, the essay evaluates recent scholarly directions in the interdisciplinary field of law and music. The essay considers both methodological and epistemological questions motivating this scholarship, and argues that there yet remains the opportunity to pursue with even greater specificity the meaning of music, in terms of its own vocabulary and genre. The new field of law and music is slowly but surely combining these formal considerations with an ever richer vocabulary, and a richer inter-disciplinary dialogue not just about jazz but with it. What might have been a somewhat sterile exercise in virtuosity is turning into a fully-fledged interdisciplinary claim, with its own methodology and its own epistemology, capable of illuminating not just law or music, but both in light of the other.     

Little revolutions in the realm of reproduction

Ann Oakley, From Here to Maternity (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1986; Berwyn Lewis, No Children by Choice (Penguin) Ringwood, 1986; Gloria Frydman, Mature‐Age Mothers (Penguin) Ringwood, 1987; Sandra Scarr and Judy Dunn, Mother Care/Other Care: The child‐care dilemma for women and children (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1987; Caroline new and Miriam David, For the Children's Sake: Making childcare more than women's business (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1985.     

Coffee House: Habitus and Performance Among Law Students

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school and explore its socialization of the students there. "Coffee House" is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms and offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that "nothing is going on," our ethnography suggests that in "Coffee House" identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation among law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.